ShaguTweaks-ClassicAPI/Docs/PERFORMANCE.md

Performance notes

Player cache (ShaguTweaks_player_cache)

The account-wide player cache feeds Social Colors, Chat Levels and the nameplate/chat class colors. It is read at every login and /reload and written at every logout, so its size is a direct load-time and memory cost. Earlier versions let it grow without limit; one account reached 4.1 MB.

libs/libunitscan.lua now owns expiry and runs it once per session, at the first loading screen:

Entry	Kept for
Player whose class is known	180 days after last sighting
Player whose class was never learned	90 days after last sighting
Whole cache	at most 10,000 players; the oldest sightings go first

• Every sighting refreshes the age: mouseover, target, nameplate, party, raid, guild roster, friend list, /who and chat.
• Guild members and friends are refreshed by their roster events every session, so they do not expire while they stay in the guild or friend list.
• Entries saved before this change have no age. They are dated from the cache's existing grace start (players_cleanup), as the old Social Colors cleanup did. The first login after the update can remove many entries.
• A player's GUID is saved only while the class is unknown. Such entries are resolved later with GetPlayerInfoByGUID when the engine knows the GUID.

The separate 180-day cleanup in Social Colors is removed. It ran only every 180 days and only while that module was enabled.

Event handling

• Chat: a speaker whose class is known and who spoke within the hour needs no GUID lookup or write.
• Guild roster: a full rescan runs at most once a minute unless the member count changed. Many addons request the roster every few seconds.
• Mouseover, target, nameplate and group sightings skip UnitGUID when UnitClass already gave the class.
• A name missing from the cache queries ClassicAPI's player cache once instead of twice.

Range Color

The module shared Blizzard's rangeTimer and tested it against 0.2 seconds. Once the timer had reset, that test was always true, so the full range check ran on every frame for every ranged action button. It now keeps its own 0.2-second timer. Blizzard's own range check runs again, so the hotkey text turns red out of range, as in the default UI.

Map and portrait checks

• WorldMap Class Colors updates its icons ten times a second, and only while the world map or battlefield minimap is open. It used to run a check on every frame with both maps closed.
• Class Portraits checks the target of target five times a second, plus at once when the stock frame reports a new name. It used to call UnitGUID on every frame.

Not changed

• Enlarged Minimap still checks the buff anchors every frame while the default buff frame is shown. The stock BuffFrame_Enchant_OnUpdate moves the buff frame back on every frame, so a less frequent check would let the buffs jump under the minimap. It writes only when an anchor has actually moved. The check is a child of BuffFrame, so it stops when a buff addon such as VCB hides the default buffs (the stock re-anchoring stops then too).

• Health Numbers and Big Health use one-shot deferred updates only.

• Both castbars update only while visible; Energy Tick hides at full mana out of combat.

• Free Slot Count counts slots once per BAG_UPDATE_DELAYED. Disable it if a bag addon already shows the count.

Nothing here has been measured in game yet. To compare before and after, see Measuring performance.